DevOps at the Gate: An Interview with EA’s Allison Miller

EA's Senior Director of Operations, Allison Miller.

When it comes to managing risk, Allison Miller is tasked with an awesome (in more ways than one) responsibility: Her very important job is to protect Electronic Arts’ invaluable digital platform from online attack. (No pressure.)

Miller built up her digital-risk street cred at companies like PayPal and Visa International, then joined video-game developer EA a year ago. She brought with her years of experience designing, building, and deploying threat-detection-and-prevention systems. The preferred (and unique) weapons of choice in her arsenal? Miller won’t divulge every tool, but she frequently calls upon her expertise in game theory, behavioral economics, statistics, and decision science.

She sat down with ActiveState’s Isabelle Groc to talk about EA’s digital transformation, the role of DevOps culture in the enterprise, and the rise of Platform as a Service (PaaS) as an enabling virtualization technology.

What brought you to EA, and what’s your role?

EA is going digital, making a switch from delivering packaged software (goods in a box) to our customers into offering video games as a service that is available 24-7, anywhere, across any device. There was something about that vision of becoming a digital game company, and defining the next phase of how video games are going to be delivered and experienced, that really appealed to me. I wanted to be part of it and see how we were going to make a digital services approach work for ourselves and our customers.

This digital transformation is underway. There are many moving parts, with services and components that already exist and that we can leverage, but there is still a lot that is getting built from scratch. The Digital Platform itself is already live, and we are in the process of delivering the various components and enabling new services. With the basic building blocks in place, we are iterating and expanding out as the new games and game technologies go live. I was brought onto the team because of my background with e-commerce and fraud prevention, to manage those teams, as well as operate across the technology organization as the CTO’s chief-of-staff.

Why the shift to digital?

By going digital we can offer so much more to our customers in terms of the richness and diversity of the experience. Digital allows us to tap into this market of gamers that we haven’t been speaking to directly before. When people think of video games, they usually think of PC games and console games, but it is the same platform that powers the games that people play on their mobile devices, tablets, or social media. If you talk to some of these folks who are playing games on their phone, they might not self-identify as “gamers” but they are, and now we can extend what we offer to them, too. We can offer our entire customer base experiences that are customized according to their preferences across devices. And so ultimately, we are going digital because our gamers are already digital.

How do you protect something like EA’s Digital Platform?

Right now I am working on the capabilities that we need to allow our good customers to go through our checkout flow and purchase what they need while at the same time making it really hard for the bad guys to attack us through those same flows. The earlier we are able to detect the attackers as they are interacting with us, the faster we can close the door. It is challenging because we need to keep the door open for our good customers, and we have to differentiate good customers from the fraudulent attackers in real-time, and usually with only a little bit of information to go on. This is a typical problem in e-commerce, and one that is critical to solve.

We evaluate every transaction that goes through our e-commerce flows to see if it meets our requirements for good customers or if it fits a pattern that we know is associated with fraud. That system needs to be smart and fast, and needs to be always on. We use a combination of cloud-based and internal tools for this scoring/evaluation process, and a lot of behavioral analytics, statistics, and experimentation with machine learning techniques.

Let’s talk DevOps — How do you define it?

To me, DevOps refers to the integration of development and operations capabilities across teams. The idea is to get everyone focused on particular end-goals to deliver and operate a service that customers need. Traditional models of development can introduce artificial process boundaries where you have product management handing off requirements to devs who hand off code to QA who hand off additional code to Ops, and then everyone hopes that at the end it is going to work. DevOps is about developing an agile production chain for software or online services.

What are the main challenges DevOps leads face today?

At EA, the Digital Platform team’s working model includes agile delivery, though we don’t necessarily describe our approach as DevOps. Because our leadership is very focused on management by objectives and constantly measuring, learning, and improving how we go about doing things, DevOps as a philosophy fits neatly into the instrumentation of systems and automation. Anything that we can do to streamline and make processes more repeatable is all for the good. We already are in a DevOps mindset because we have to think what the impact is going to be before we release. On my team we have a microcosm of the approach, we design the requirements for what our business logic must do, we are the ones who code it, we are the ones who test it, and we are the ones who operate it and make sure our business logic is performing as it needs to.

Ultimately the whole purpose of DevOps is to make everyone more effective– to get to the end-goal faster and more efficiently. No manager will push back on that kind of philosophy! One of the things I love about the DevOps movement is the emphasis on open culture, and how folks share what they learn. A rising tide lifts all boats: Everyone is growing and gets to learn from the experiences that are shared.

What is your experience with Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology?

PaaS makes a lot of sense to me because all of the layers on which my services rest, or for that matter any application, feature, or functionality that I am working on, I’m pretty much agnostic to the environment, whether it is cloud-based or private in-house. As long as it works and scales! So I love PaaS because you can get all these different pieces out of the box to make your service work, and you can focus your energy on the pieces where you’re adding value. For me, it is the application level or in the business logic, so having the ability to get a computing environment out of the box, get software developers to code things in an environment that will be exactly what it is in production, and be able to test things out on the higher layer without worrying about the lower layers is fantastic.

Where does PaaS fit into the DevOps movement, and what is the future of PaaS?

One of the themes that I have been hearing lately coming out of DevOps is that developers can’t just come forward and say “this code is shippable” and call it a day. What is really needed is the combination of shippable code and a stable environment that it is going to run in, because the real end goal is a working product/service. With PaaS you can get to that immediately. You can use PaaS to offer the environment that the developers develop in, and then it is already production-ready. There are no surprises. There can be a lot of time lost for Operations trying to understand what specific environment the developers were able to get their code ready in. So if that chunk of time can just be given back, the release will go faster.

Time will tell what the future of PaaS will be. The cloud is hot, you can’t get away from it. Also, what we think of PaaS today might be different in a year. Vendors have been very responsive and adapting to market needs.

What steps should DevOps should consider when developing a PaaS strategy for their organization?

DevOps should ultimately consider what their team’s goals are and how they want to operate, and then evaluate PaaS just like they would evaluate any other option. There are a lot of benefits associated with having standardization of computing environments and infrastructure components, so it’s just like any other operations or architecture decision: what is the cost, what are the benefits, how much flexibility will you need, what is the time horizon?

Tell us about some of the interesting features of EA’s new digital platform.

One of the features includes the Single ID, which allows us to better identify and understand our consumer base no matter what platform they are coming from. It used to be that if I went to play a game on my mobile phone or on my PC, there was no way to tell that I was the same person and make that gaming experience consistent across all platforms. This new feature will benefit the gamers because we are able to customize their experience based on their preferences, provide better game updates and information to them across all the platforms they play.

Your favorite video games and what you like about them?

On my mobile phone, my favorite game to play is an EA game called The Simpsons: Tapped Out because it is just a simple and silly game, it is so much fun, and I love the characters. I’ve also been playing around with Star Wars: The Old Republic. MMO’s have an interesting social aspect, and of course it has the Star Wars mythology to draw upon. I mean, who doesn’t want to be a Jedi, right? Yoda would have made a great DevOps: Release, or release not, there is no “try”.

Isabelle Groc joined ActiveState as a Technical Editor after several years as a freelance journalist, editor, and photographer, and has contributed to PC Magazine, Canadian Geographic, Discover, Canadian Wildlife, and Scientific American.